Moving for a postdoc can be expensive. This pilot program shows one way to help

From ScienceMag:

When Ashlynn Boedecker started her postdoc, the moving costs—renting a truck, gas, a security deposit, rent—were more than she had available in her bank account, she recalls.

The aquatic biogeochemist, like many academics, wasn’t a stranger to financially stressful moves. When she relocated to start her Ph.D. at Baylor University after finishing her master’s degree, she couldn’t afford to buy a mattress for the first few months. “I slept on the floor … on a makeshift bed,” she says.

But this time around, Boedecker was more fortunate: She was one of 51 Ohio State University (OSU) postdocs awarded $5000 to cover or reimburse moving costs. “It was super helpful,” she says. “Moving is expensive.”

The OSU pilot program, which began in 2022 funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, was the brainchild of Zakee Sabree, a former faculty director for OSU’s office of postdoctoral affairs. Sabree, an associate professor and microbial ecoevolutionary biologist, was inspired to take action after speaking with postdocs about their financial challenges and reading a 2019 Nature Careers story entitled “How a long-distance job move can leave early-career researchers short of cash.” “I remember my own experience of having to fund all of my moves,” he says. “When I saw that postdocs are still doing the exact same thing I was doing, oh gosh, nearly 20 years ago, it was surprising to me.”

Early-career scientists are often expected to uproot their lives and move to a new location every few years. But given the low pay of many graduate student and postdoc positions, “financially, it’s not always possible,” notes Veronica Farrugia Drakard, an ocean science postdoc at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and member of the National Postdoctoral Association’s postdoc council. Some universities, programs, and individual faculty members provide support to postdocs who relocate for the job, she notes. But according to an analysis of policies at 49 research-intensive universities Sabree and colleagues published last month in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, it isn’t very common, at least at the university level.

The OSU pilot program shows one way it can be done. Science Careers spoke with Sabree to find out more about the program and why funding for postdoc relocation expenses is needed. The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: What are the challenges and constraints for faculty who are trying to fund this on their own? I imagine it’s hard given that salaries are going up and budgets have remained relatively flat.

A: I think faculty are recognizing that it’s harder to just recruit postdocs because fewer and fewer Ph.D.s are doing postdocs. So even though the budgets have been flat, faculty who want postdocs are having to be a lot more creative and are trying to do things like this to stand out. That’s particularly true for junior faculty that are trying to compete for the best postdocs with labs that might be more well known and well established. Faculty are also using these kinds of incentives in efforts to try to recruit postdocs that are maybe from underrepresented backgrounds, who may not have independent wealth to be able to support them traveling from place to place.

Q: Incoming postdocs are often coming straight out of grad school, so they probably don’t have a lot on their bank account.

A: Exactly. I learned from the questionnaire that we administered to recipients of the award, that some of them were like, “I came from a family where I’m the first person to go to college, and there just wasn’t any money. So this was really nice, because it meant that I didn’t have to put this on a credit card.” Many of them had very little, if any, savings. Some of them had debt from grad school.

Q: How did you select who received the funding?

A: We wanted faculty to use this as a way to recruit really competitive postdocs. And so when we put out the call, we told faculty, “You don’t have to have hired someone. You can tell them that, ‘If you do come to OSU, this is one of the things that I could offer.’” So it was available for faculty to use as an incentive. It was also available for postdocs that had been here for less than a year.

Then for who we selected, we were looking to support postdocs that were going to labs where faculty had a record of having done some kind of training in postdoctoral mentoring, or had some history in having mentored a lot of postdocs. Because we wanted to ensure that we were funding postdocs that were going to be getting a lot of support. We were also interested in postdocs that were doing research that asked questions that impacted underrepresented people in some kind of way. In the end, we were able to fund about 40% of the applications.

Q: You got this funding from Kellogg for the pilot project. Are you going to continue it and scale it up? What’s the plan going forward?

A: We reached out to some university leadership about scaling up this program, because it’s fairly inexpensive to run, and we were informally encouraged to continue to seek external support for this program. I’m no longer the faculty director, and so it’s not clear to me if the current director is going to try to pursue external support for it. It’s uncertain what will happen.

Q: In your paper you recommended incoming faculty think about negotiating postdoc relocation expenses in their startup budgets. Are there other creative ways to fund this?

A: That’s right, it was one of my co-authors who had suggested that. It made all the sense in the world to include that as a part of the startup package negotiations. Another idea we had, but didn’t put in the paper, was that faculty could apply for this kind of funding every few years—for example, every third or fourth year the university could provide them with support to hire a postdoc like this. So it wouldn’t be something for all postdocs being hired at all times, but all faculty would receive this kind of relocation support occasionally. This way, it wouldn’t have to be quite so expensive for central budgets.

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